On September 28, 2010 members of the Open Office Project formed a new group called The Document Foundation, and made available a rebranded fork of OpenOffice provisionally named “LibreOffice”. The Foundation stated that it will coordinate and oversee the development of LibreOffice.

My fears of this ordeal is that Oracle sticks to their hardcore innovation killing plans and do not support TDF. By keeping the trademark for OpenOffice.org they may keep a marketing advantage and thus cause great confusion for users around the world who seek the license/patent free desktop office suite.

A well remembered fork of free software in recent times was that of the X.org foundation breaking free from XFree86. XFree86 and X.org are both software that implement the X11 protocol, which is responsible for giving your unix/linux software a way to display graphical user interfaces. Nothing the ordinary end-user cares about how its done and thus the transition went smoothly. Wikipedia sums it up like this:

As mentioned, this was a fork that never came to affect the end-user in terms of choice, installation and distribution. People who used computers never had to consider which X11 implementation to use and, in either case, just about every developer hopped on the X.org train to ensure future compatibility and possibility to continue developing it as the free software community.

With OpenOffice.org it’s different. Much different in fact, because end-users have gotten used to the name. Users of OpenOffice.org believe that it’s the alternative to Microsoft Office and that anything new – despite sharing the same codebase – is written from scratch. What I mean is the old marketing trick of “we made this first”, despite the fact that TDF consists of OOo old-timers.

Oracle may also, which is different from the XF86 case, employ enough programmers to keep up with LibreOffice features, under a possibly (likely) proprietary future license. This will hurt LibreOffice’s ability to compete given the lack of an established name with the end-users.

On the opposite side of the table Oracle may very well stop distribution whatsoever of OpenOffice.org. This would cause headlines which may scare people into using any proprietary “future safe” office suite. It would make it easier for LibreOffice to establish itself, but would be a big slap of FUD on the entire free software community.

Because of the above reasons, supported by possibilities which free software has uniquely contributed to our world, Oracle should definitely donate the trademark of OpenOffice.org to The Document Foundation. Anything else will at least temporarily hurt the distribution and support of the most competent open source, free software, office suite.

My reasons to believe that TDF will be able to succeed in moving users to LibreOffice however is simply the list of supporters including Novell, RedHat, Canonical and Google. Being the default office suite in the most widely used GNU/Linux distributions, at least free software users won’t be led astray.

Update 2010-10-08: I noticed that StarOffice, OOo’s proprietary soulsucker, has changed its name to – wait for it – Oracle Open Office. I think it’s quite clear now what will happen to OpenOffice.org. I did not explicitly know this until now, but I guess the founders of The Document Foundation did…

Unfortunately most people seem to think that battery power, ease of use and stability are irrelevant. Or they don’t actually want something mobile but rather a cool gadget. This causes people to buy unstable, unusable and/or incredibly restricted phones from these three categories:

Apple iPhone

Random Google Android mobile

Random Windows 7 mobile

Despite high price-tags none of these choices are good, mostly due to their respective operating systems. All of these phones market themselves to be “powerful” and probably “versatile” and maybe even “usable”. Though none of them – of course – market the restrictions implied.

Apple iPhone

A cool, sleek interface. In these days a nice piece of hardware too. Probably easy to sell, because you have the backing of an “app store” and also the “cool factor” which means everyone has it and everyone is talking about it.

The downsides are: To legally distribute software for use on the iPhone, you need Apple’s approval. This approval implies that you accept Apple as a benevolent God who – when feeling the urge – can shut down software on your phone that you legally bought. The software approval thing also means that anything anyone does better than Apple will not be accepted into the App Store. Geez.

Android phones

None of these phones are other than slow and unstable when it comes to using then. Besides this the software distribution is messy and difficult to overview. There is no immediate logic in which Android version runs what software and on which phone.

My personal reason for disliking it is purely ideological. Marketing says it’s “open”, promotes “open source” and whatever. However, the platform doesn’t appeal to open source software and everything has to be written very specifically for the Android phone. Porting software is apparently not as simple as one could’ve hoped.

Lately Oracle, since the Sun acquiry, have been yelling that Google infringe patents and copyright. This because Google has their own Java virtual machine for the Android phones. The patent issue itself isn’t troublesome, I think it’s worse that Google didn’t just run Linux straight-up on their otherwise capable platforms.

Windows 7 phones

No one buys these for themselves… They’re probably just bought through companies who offer them to suffering employees. Same thing here applies as with Apple: Both companies are evil.

Latest news are that (as mentioned above) Windows 7 mobiles won’t allow native applications. This system of signed applications opens up for a system of Apple-like dictatorial “blessed apps”. It also obviously disables development by homebrew hackers.

Consider your everyday tasks which are either of private concern, some sort of communication or information access. These routines are all possible to do using libre (free) software. The Free software is in no way under usage control of neither private companies, your neighbor nor any governmental censorship bureau.

With libre licensing:
You control your device and software.
No one else can interfere.

The Nokia N900, runs the GNU/Linux operating system. This reflects the “ideological choice” of this post’s subject, the choice to run Free software. What is essential is the ability to share and – especially – modify the source code. Even if you won’t do it yourself.

Free software in practice disables an external dictatorship over the software your machine runs. This comes from the fact that any developer, through international copyright, is given the legal right to modify and distribute changes. This also means that even if all the world’s developers suddenly disappeared the current version would still be shared in a fine, working condition.

This causes the direct opposite evolution compared to proprietary (closed source) software companies who offer you only one choice – the latest version. They need you to update to increase the revenue while Free software is only interested in functionality and effectiveness. This is most noticable when an already fine, working proprietary software gets a new version: the update will most certainly include bloat and/or new restrictions.

This post not only encourages your informed choice for smartphones – a major business which fuels proprietary software. It is meant to persuade you to use Free software to the greatest extent possible. You’re probably already using OpenOffice or Mozilla Firefox – which is great because every single replaced software counts. If you like those, your next step may be Ubuntu – to replace the entire operating system.

Andrew Warner at Mixergy has published a discussion [MP3, transcript] between Chris Pearson (founder of Thesis, a very advanced WordPress theme) and Matt Mullenweg (who I’d call Mr. WordPress). This is a perfect example of what the debate between the copyright industry vs. iPirates (intellectual property pirates) is like. A very interesting software license and copyright debate, if you ask me.

Matt responds well to a long rant (blah blah, can’t make money if it’s freely licensed) by Chris. Start listening at 16:30 if you wish to hear the end of the rant and the response. The bottom line is that Chris Pearson sees Thesis – which requires WordPress – as entirely his own property which no one can use. He’s just out to state that “he’s not a follower” and says that Matt is trying “to dictate” usage through the GPL.

Chris Pearson refers at 8:30 to “Mike Wasylik” (he says Brian), an attorney who has written “Why the GPL doesn’t apply to premium WordPress themes“. However not related to the same kind of dilemma WordPress vs. Thesis is about. Mike Wasylik’s examples are related to the Game Genie’s modification of running binaries of Nintendo games – which does not apply at all to the source code license which the GPL is.

Also, Chris mentions that WordPress “is only a backend” and that “WordPress [on its own] only serves a blank page”. What he forgets is that WordPress also serves an API over XML-RPC etc….

It isn’t correct to think of WordPress and a theme as separate entities. As far as the code is concerned, they form one functional unit. The theme code doesn’t sit “on top of” WordPress. It is within it, in multiple different places, with multiple interdependencies.

Basically: Thesis (or any WP theme), when used, becomes a part of that running copy of WordPress. At source code and PHP interpretation level. Thus, at that specific point, the GPL must be followed. To clear things up, Mark Jaquith also mentions the API system:

WordPress has many external APIs that spit out data. Interacting with these APIs does not put your code on the same level as core WordPress code.

Update: Thesis now has a split license PHP code is GPLv2, everything else (CSS, images, added JS etc.) . Probably because of the bad press. Unfortunately this means that Chris Pearson probably didn’t learn anything in the process except perhaps humility. It’d be cool though if the license for CSS and images were Free too. At least it’d mend the community’s wounds a bit.

Naucler Design wanted a website matching design preferences found in their clothes' designs.

Earlier this year I “finished” (kill your darlings…) a redesign for the latex designer Naucler Design. This post was initiated right after that, but I haven’t gotten the motivation to finish it yet (killing another darling). The result is a hasty manifest to usability.

Naucler Design had long hoped to get a new website, but their first alternative as web designer wasn’t really appropriate. No agitation towards the original designer, everyone has their purpose in this world, but when the fundamental idea seems to be “bling-bling”, my inner minimalist gets brain-aids. The designer’s example had commercialism written all over it (FOLLOW THE BLINKING RABBIT) which in turn causes information to drowned in a sea of unintuitive design.

The other day I talked with a friend about the usability guru Jakob Nielsen. He usually knows best regarding design, accessibility and such, which many Web 2.0 fans forget about. He is a constant reminder that websites should be adapted for people who are blind, disabled, epileptics and deaf as well as search engines. Also the site should work for ordinary sheeple (IE), fashion bloggers (OMG PONIES!!!) and CEOs (iPhone) – all without giving the webdesigner brain aids.

Myspace is a good example of a site which has tried hard to ignore all critera for good usability. Not even the bands who use the site could possibly think it’s easy to use or even usable.

But I digress, back to Naucler Design. Their first alternative was to use Joomla!, a free and GPL’d CMS (Content Management System) which can do just about anything. The problem is that the general feeling I get is “hack upon hack” and in the end you have the world’s most bloated CMS. The administration is confusing and horribly inefficient and the codebase is generally slow. It’s my strong opinion that a content manager should manage content and not much more – am I wrong?

Personally I preferWordPress for just about everything but static pages. I share their philosophy, the developers write beautiful code and they try hard not to add bloat. The design – both appearance and administrative – is also easy, concise and appealing. By contrast, Joomla is kind of like a xenon filled Hindenburg driven by a coal power plant and has to be modified with a blowtorch and sledgehammer.

Pöh.

True, there are many plugins for Joomla! which allow you to avoid the heavy tools. But the fact of the matter is that just about every single plugin is even worse than the original codebase, as well as they often promote Flash and other bloaty, proprietary technology. The bling-bling is also there in the background no matter how much you peal off. That’s what Naucler Design appreciated did not exist with WordPress’ standard design and philosophy. This simplified my task immensely.

(With that said, Naucler Design uses osCommerce for their webshop. osCommerce is old and stable but has an incredibly patchy and ugly codebase, by far worse than Joomla! But there are really no alternatives in that department, neither free nor proprietary software. So let’s leave that aside for the sake of this post.)

So please, people who are about to create or remake a website. For a greater good – including web standards and such – please choose a solution where you choose rather than remove components. If you find yourself “adding too much” – despite a site engine like WordPress – you’re already doing it wrong. Remember that the information flow on today’s internet is huge and that people ignore most of what they see – especially advertisement. So make sure what you’re offering is clean, simple and informative.

There’s a constricted idea of what the internet is capable of. Social media is immediatly attributed to Facebook and Twitter because they’re the biggest players on the field. In Sweden, Spotify is getting great press even though Jamendo is the superior choice for music distribution. The internet is not trade or services – it’s communication.

Someone suggeststeaching Facebook to schools to make them understand social media. But if we attribute it the label “social media”, do we not suggest much more than a lucky US-based company which merely offers a centralised, restrictive, surveilled and censored service? This post is not aimed at that specific article however. It’s much more general than that.

What we see today are only a proof of concept for a baseline of possibilites available by way of the internet. The current “globally used” (what about Brazil and China?) services are all centralised and restrictive. We are bound to see future development in even more awesome social networking technologies available to common internet users – similar to Google Wave. Today we have user-created services with user-generated content and the key of the future is decentralization. This implies even more social interaction, resulting in greater user-based filtering.

Personally, I’m seeing the world from a technical point of view. Unfortunately, for the end-user, the development process is often irrelevant. Free software is thought of as “free as in beer”, not free as in speech. Culture is copied and fileshared without regards to copyright laws, and thus Free culture is also viewed just as if it wasn’t priced. The steps to a common understanding of libre – the right to use, modify and share – seem long and far away. Nevertheless they’re prerequisites for future development in online social networking.

Then how do we change this nihilistic, disrespective view on social media’s true nature? One might start with presenting Twitter’s main open source competitor identi.ca, using Creative Commons Attribution licensing. Also there’s the open source WordPress, which I use, that is superior in all aspects to any proprietary platform such as Google’s Blogger or Sweden’s popular “blogg.se”. Another service is the unfortunately closed source Flickr, but at least CC-licensing is a given choice there.

If the general public starts recognising what separates these services from the proprietary and restrictive ones, we are not far from a social media revolution. One might not immediatly think about it, but copyright issues today enforce a noticable restriction on social media development. Sites like YouTube are more successful than progressive open source alternatives simply because they have a legal department financed by Google. Free licenses, however, effectively reduce the amount of bureacracy needed to come up with new ideas.

A lighter copyright regulation would immediatly spawn several new internet top sites. To catch a glimpse of the future-to-be, compare the all-praised Spotify with its direct libre counterpart, Jamendo. The latter allows you to listen without registration, payment or advertisement. Jamendo also allows you to choose your music player of choice, embed it on other web services, download entire albums for offline-access. Heck, Jamendo even lets you support the artists and easily share your own works! From what I hear, Spotify can’t do any of those things.

The future is decentralization. With my above conclusions, users can soon also take part in the distribution, not just generation, of content. It’ll be harder to make mad profit, so there’ll be resistance – but this also introduces significantly lower costs. Given that the internet isn’t crippledalong the way, we’ll be getting there site by site, API by API. Open standards, one by one.Shortly followed (or introduced?) by Free – libre – software implementations. Paving the path for true social networking.

Update 2009-12-31 14.23: I forgot to mention the most important part about Jamendo – they allow you to upload your own, independent work to benefit from the entire Creative Commons community.

Cory Doctorow, I found through the EFF, mentions that anyone against DRM-free e-books by consequence wishes to abolish the printed book, since printed books have an ancient history of being shared regardless of copyright. That’s exactly why social media can’t be social as long as we’ve got specific laws which are different from afk social behaviour.